CNX Resources Corporation
Q1 2018 Earnings Call Transcript

Published: 3 May 2018

[Operator:]

Good morning and welcome to the CNX Resources First Quarter 2018 Earnings Conference Call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Please note, this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Tyler Lewis, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, Mr. Lewis.

[Tyler Lewis:]

Thanks, Anita, and good morning, everybody. Welcome to CNX Resources' first quarter conference call. We have in the room today Nick DeIuliis, our President and CEO; Don Rush, our Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer; and Tim Dugan, our Chief Operating Officer. Today, we will be discussing our first quarter results, and we posted an updated slide presentation to our website. To remind everyone, with CNX acquiring the remaining 50% membership interest in CNX Gathering LLC this quarter, CNX is consolidating its results, which includes 100% of the results from CNX, CNX Gathering LLC, CNX Midstream GP LLC and CNX Midstream Partners LP. Earlier this morning, CNX Midstream Partners, ticker CNXM, issued a separate press release. As a reminder, they will have an earnings call at 11

[Nicholas J. DeIuliis:]

Thanks, Tyler. Good morning, everybody. Let's begin with a very important theme for some time now and one that has continued into the quarter. Off the heels of the separation of the company late last year and the Midstream acquisition at the beginning of this year, first quarter of 2018 provided us the opportunity to really kick our capital allocation philosophy into high gear, as we moved exclusively into execution mode. And sure, we're in an era of playing offense and our opportunity set is robust. More on this and the thoughts on this in a moment. Before turning it over to the team for specifics on financial and operational metrics, let's get some of the important highlights for the quarter. Most of you are aware; we held an Analyst & Investor Meeting on March 13, providing a tremendous amount of updated information. Some of that information already contained a few of the highlights from the first quarter with the meeting having taken place towards the end of the quarter. So I'll provide just a quick summary of what you might have already heard back in March as well as some key updates. If you turn to slide 3 in our deck that we posted this morning, this slide really helps pull together some of the major takeaways from the first quarter, but it doesn't include everything. Said differently maybe, it was an exceptionally busy and very successful quarter. Tim Dugan's going to touch on operations in more detail, but you can see it's highlighted on the slide that we had record production in the first quarter of 129.5 Bcf or average daily production of 1.439 Bcf per day. First quarter does include contribution from the shallow oil and gas assets that we sold, which I'll get to in a moment, and that was approximately 4.5 Bcf of the 129.5 Bcf. So production was very strong, but more importantly, we achieved this record level of production through the deployment of capital investment with high internal rate of returns meaningfully above our costs of capital. That's a key component and perhaps the key component of our capital allocation philosophy at work. Sticking with operations, we continued our stacked pay delineation program, turned in line two additional deep dry Utica wells, the Richhill 11 well in our Southwest PA Central type curve region, and the Marchand 3M well in Indiana County, PA, which is on the northern fringes of our CPA South type curve region. Tim is going to provide more detail, but suffice it to say that we continue to be excited about the deep dry Utica and the disruptor that we think it will be in the Appalachian Basin in terms of stacked pay development and the economies of scale that it brings to the table. Also, during the quarter, we continued our share repurchase program. More detail on that in a moment, but yet another key component of our capital allocation philosophy at work. In addition to repurchasing shares this quarter, we also paid down approximately $391 million of our 2022 notes. And you shift over to Midstream on slide 3, we had a lot happen on this side of our business throughout the quarter. I mentioned earlier, we closed on the acquisition of the remaining 50% interest of the GP that our previous joint venture partner held for approximately $305 million. This now gives us 100% control of that entity. We offset the purchase price with an inaugural dropdown post-acquisition of the Shirley-Pennsboro Midstream assets for $265 million. And in addition to the Shirley-Pennsboro drop this quarter, we sold our shallow oil and gas assets and some other miscellaneous assets for $102 million. Now, last but certainly not least on slide 3, following the close of the quarter, CNX entered into an exchange agreement with HG Energy. I'll touch more on this in a few slides and what it means for CNX, but I'd also highlight that we intend to go into more specifics on our CNX Midstream call at 11

[Donald W. Rush:]

Great. Thanks, Nick, and good morning, everyone. And as Nick mentioned, I will be walking through specifics of the HG transaction on our Midstream call at 11

[Timothy C. Dugan:]

Thanks, Don, and good morning, everyone. With the spin transaction in the Midstream GP acquisition firmly in the rearview mirror, the team is excited to focus more and more on operational execution. And that's just what we did in the first quarter of 2018, as we drove record production volumes and lowered unit cost helping to set the stage for very strong year-over-year EBITDAX growth in the full year. Now, I'd like to take a second just to clarify one statement on the HG transaction that Nick talked about that we closed late yesterday. We brought in 15,000 undeveloped acres in the Southwest PA Central type curve region. 11,400 of those acres were Marcellus, not 14,100, which means we brought in 3,600 Utica acres. So, moving to slide 12, let's go through some of the operational highlights for the quarter. As already highlighted by the team, total sales volumes of 129.5 Bcfe represent an increase of 9% over the fourth quarter of 2017 and a 36% increase over the same period last year. Much of that increase can be attributed to the higher dry Utica volumes out of Monroe County, Ohio, as total Utica production is up almost 200% year-over-year. Our team continues to see successes with some revised completion designs and field optimization decisions in Monroe County, which we'll talk about shortly. Total production costs are down $0.22 per Mcfe year-over-year as the growth in Ohio dry Utica volumes with favorable gathering rates reduced overall gathering costs. There was an additional benefit from lower per unit DD&A year-over-year as rates were re-evaluated as of year-end 2017. And we expect to see DD&A unit cost around this level for the rest of the year. We did experience some higher than usual per unit lease operating expense in the quarter, driven by water disposal cost related to our activity schedule with a lot of these costs coming out of Monroe County where our ability to reuse water has decreased due to our activities starting to roll off in this area, as we talked about at the Analyst & Investor Meeting. As a reminder, we have 15 total turn-in-lines in our 2018 plan, of which six were turned in-line in the first quarter. Despite some of these abnormal LOE costs in the quarter, we're already seeing these costs moderate. Now regarding service costs, we continue to run two frac crews, which are under contract through September 2018, and we'll bring in a third crew as needed. We're not seeing service inflation to-date, but there will be an opportunity for providers to renegotiate rates in September according to the terms of our contracts. Any potential increases are capped by the terms of the contracts and can be renegotiated by either side. Based on current market conditions for labor, equipment and commodities, we're not expecting any major increases from renegotiations, and have reaffirmed our full-year 2018 capital budget. On the drilling side, beginning in the third quarter of 2018, rig rates for 50% of our fleet are expected to drop 10% due to the expiration of legacy contract rates. As a result, we're not anticipating any meaningful increases in drilling costs for the year. Slide 13 is a summary of our activity in the first quarter and the remainder of our plans for the full year. In the quarter, we ran three horizontal rigs, drilled a total of 19 wells, 17 of those in Southwest PA Central Marcellus and two in Monroe County dry Utica. In total, we turned 14 wells to sale, including six Southwest PA Central Marcellus, one Southwest PA Central deep dry Utica, one CPA South deep dry Utica, and as I mentioned, six in the Ohio dry Utica area of Monroe County. The two deep dry Utica wells are both important additional steps on the path to delineate the formation and build the stacked pay factory we discussed at our Analyst & Investor Meeting in March. The Southwest PA Central dry Utica well we first announced in March, the Richhill 11E, continues to undergo managed pressure testing in the early phase of its producing life. It's already provided a wealth of data necessary to optimally develop the Utica in the Richhill field and drive stacked pay efficiencies in the very near future. The Marchand 3M deep Utica well is located in Indiana County, PA, about 15 miles from our prolific Gaut and Aikens wells. This well is also undergoing managed pressure testing in the first weeks of its life. Marchand is a valuable data point in the broader delineation of the deep dry Utica formation in CPA. And we plan to drill, complete and turn-in-line one additional Utica well in CPA South in the second half of this year near the Gaut and Aikens, as we laid out at the Investor Meeting. Also, in this slide, you can see the 2018 full year plan. The schedule is unchanged since our March meeting and we remain on track to turn-in-line 74 wells for the year, while bringing in a fourth rig in the third quarter. Almost two thirds of our activity for the year is in our prolific core-of-the-core Southwest PA Central, which is in CNX Midstream DevCo I area. This activity should help drive predictable and repeatable results, maintaining an efficient operating cadence. As for the activity pace throughout the rest of 2018, we expect the second quarter to be the lightest with a modest quarter-over-quarter decline compared to the first quarter of 2018, with volumes increasing in the third and fourth quarters. Turned in lines are expected to peak in the third quarter, which will drive production to peak levels for the year and Q4. Now slide 14, the Green Hill area in Southwest PA Central is a great example of how completion design optimization, operational advancements and well delineated geological properties are driving capital efficiency gains in the core Marcellus. To be specific, GH-55 well turned in line in the first quarter are seeing capital efficiency gains of nearly 40% compared to the wells from 2015 and 2016. This is driven primarily by improved cycle times and longer laterals. Most importantly, these completion designs and operational techniques are transferring, as we speak, to the Richhill Marcellus area where we plan to execute stacked pay development in the near future. On slide 15 is the other half of the stacked pay equation, the dry Utica. In the first quarter, we continued to execute in SWITZ area of Monroe County, Ohio, and have further refined our development plan to optimize development not just by well or by pad but by the entire field. As a result, we widened inter-lateral spacing from 1,100 feet to 1,350 feet, which improves capital efficiency as fewer total laterals are necessary to recover a similar level of production volumes. The result has been a 30% decline in cost per lateral foot and a 65% increase in total capital efficiency on the wider space laterals. The map on the right of the slide illustrates why the progress we're seeing right now in Southwest PA Central Marcellus and Ohio dry Utica are so important to the future of our development program. These operational techniques and field design schemes are carrying directly into Richhill where the geological characteristics are similar in both formations. The capital efficiency gains driven by these techniques and development plans will only be compounded by the expected gains from stacked pay developments. We will be increasing Richhill Marcellus activity substantially in the second half of this year and plan to have the stacked pay factory in manufacturing mode in Richhill by the end of 2019. To recap, we're setting the stage for future dual-formation development with solid execution across the portfolio, as we speak. We reached record levels of production in the first quarter at 1.44 Bcfe per day. We continue to be excited about prospects for the deep dry Utica in both Southwest PA and CPA and look forward to keeping you all informed of our progress. With that, I will turn it over to Tyler.

[Tyler Lewis:]

That concludes our prepared commentary. Anita, if you could please open the line up for Q&A at this time.

[Operator:]

We will now begin the question-and-answer session. The first question today comes from Holly Stewart with Scotia Howard. Please go ahead.

[Holly Barrett Stewart:]

Good morning, gentlemen. Maybe the first question for Tim. I know you mentioned you only have one more kind of deep Utica well planned for the year, but it looks like you pushed up the end service of the Marchand well. So, should we think about this as this is the plan or could things change if well performance continues to outpace your expectations?

[Nicholas J. DeIuliis:]

Well, the pushing up of the Marchand was just due to cycle time improvements across the board. Our plan that we laid out in March has not changed. So the wells that we laid out or the number of wells that we laid out for the dry Utica in March in the next year or two stays the same, and we will continue to pursue the delineation program and move into development in CPA and in Southwest PA. As I mentioned, we'll be moving into the stacked pay mode here full-fledged in 2019.

[Holly Barrett Stewart:]

And speaking of that, can you remind us are there any official stacked pay wells planned for 2018?

[Timothy C. Dugan:]

There's just another delineation well later in the year that we highlighted, Holly, the one additional CPA well a little bit later in the year.

[Nicholas J. DeIuliis:]

Yes. I think the first stacked pay well will be – or pad will be in 2019.

[Holly Barrett Stewart:]

Okay.

[Nicholas J. DeIuliis:]

And into that year, we'll get more heavily into stacked pay development. It is just an ongoing progression.

[Holly Barrett Stewart:]

Okay, great. And then, maybe one for Nick. Just to get a better sense of how you might proceed with the buyback. I know the leverage metric seems to be your sort of governor here, but you've got $250 million remaining, I think, and that expires in September. So if you exhaust that before September or if it expires, how should we think about sort of moving forward? You just get board approval for a new one or just kind of give us a sense of how to think about the ongoing buyback?

[Nicholas J. DeIuliis:]

Holly, I think it really goes back to the approach we use on why we are interested in the share repurchases. These are viewed from the get go as opportunistic more than what I call programmatic. So it's not something or an instance where we'd want to allocate so much of our cash flows per year or per quarter to something like share count reduction. It is instead more looking for windows of time when we have disconnects between what we think the company is worth and what the shares are trading at and doing those types of activities then and at some point stopping them when you get parity to what we think the company is worth on an NAV per share basis. So, looking forward for the rest of the year, I still see a window there to get really strong, greater returns on share repurchases above our margin of safety. And unless something changes materially on share price, the expectation should be that we continue in some fashion. Now, as to what happens when we get into sort of the end of the one-year authorization and whether we keep going or put another program in or the specific timings of when the $450 million program wraps up, probably premature to say at this point. But right now, we see a window, and right now, we plan on continuing on.

[Holly Barrett Stewart:]

That's great. And maybe just one final one from me, just kind of high level, looking at this strategic transaction with HG. Is there anything, since you're adding acreage, that we should expect to sort of play into the 2018-2019 development plans?

[Nicholas J. DeIuliis:]

I think the way to look at that, in particular with the question you're asking is one or two ways and it really goes to – I think it was slide 6 in our deck that was a repeat of what we had in March. So I was making a point back in March that our core-of-the-core Southwest PA Marcellus locations, if you take our activity set that we projected out over the 2018, 2019, 2020 timeframe, we would still be left with – at the time, I think it was 217 core-of-the-core locations. So the point at that time was we've got additional running room with Marcellus after that time period or has opportunity to grab upside or cover contingency items in the front three years. This deal when you look at it from a Resources perspective, it adds to that inventory and using the acreage numbers that we quoted with our spacings, et cetera, it takes that what was 217 up to 287 of remaining inventory at the end of 2020. So, that added inventory could do a couple of things on the Resources side and then translate into value on the Midstream side. That could be additional upside capacity for us if we continue to compress cycle times. That could be a contingency covering or fallback positions, Plan B, so to speak, if something or some bottleneck pops up over the coming years with respect to our plans and growth. But suffice to say, no matter which one of those two we end up in, these are some of the highest, if not the highest, rate of return capital allocation options we have within the portfolio. And being able to grow that by 32% is a really good thing not just for Resources, but also for Midstream. We just closed yesterday, so we're going to be working like crazy across the Resources and Midstream team to figure out what impact, if any, result in a new sort of optimized view of that over the coming years. But I think with everything we've laid out in March and everything we've laid out today, the overall picture, the overall game plan has not changed, other than we got more running room.

[Holly Barrett Stewart:]

Yes. Okay, great. Thanks, guys.

[Operator:]

The next question comes from Welles Fitzpatrick with SunTrust. Please go ahead.

[Welles Fitzpatrick:]

Hey. Good morning. Maybe the first one to follow-up on Holly's question, and obviously, you guys are going to talk more about this on the Midstream call. But the 70 additional locations from the transaction, is it safe to assume that those are in the kind of 9,500 foot lateral range and that the royalty is probably a little bit closer to market price than the kind of 9% to 13% that you guys currently enjoy in Southwest PA?

[Donald W. Rush:]

Yeah. I don't have the breakout of the royalty interests offhand. There is some feed (00

[Welles Fitzpatrick:]

Okay, perfect. Sorry. Go ahead.

[Timothy C. Dugan:]

It'll fit with the average lateral lengths that we've laid out from our Analyst Day.

[Welles Fitzpatrick:]

Okay, wonderful. And then just a modeling one. Obviously, the water disposal costs you hit on pushed up 1Q LOE. But obviously, we have full year guidance out there, but should we see a big drop into 2Q with the shallow divestiture? Presumably, those had a much higher per unit LOE even though the production wasn't that flush.

[Timothy C. Dugan:]

I think the shallow operating wells were – did have an higher operating cost. So, the impact of that'll be reflected. Those being moved out. And then, as far as the water, we've already taken steps to improve those costs. That was really – a lot of that was tied to – it's tied activity set. It was also impacted by weather. We had to take more of our water to disposal. And because of the weather that we saw early on in the quarter, more operators had to take water to disposal because of slowdown in activity and created some long wait times of disposal wells and increased our disposal cost. But we've already – like I said, we've already taken steps to improve that significantly.

[Welles Fitzpatrick:]

Okay. Makes sense, and then just one last one from me. Any update on the Cardinal open season? And post the CBM sale, is that thought of internally as much more of a drop candidate than a sale candidate?

[Donald W. Rush:]

Yeah. So, no further updates on any open season there. But we've laid it out as a potential drop candidate into CNXM. We do think highly of the asset. It's a positive free cash flow producing asset like anything. We're always looking to maximize opportunities any time they present themselves. But right now, we're just going to continue to enhance the value there.

[Welles Fitzpatrick:]

That's great. Thanks and congrats and it looks like a great transaction with HG.

[Donald W. Rush:]

Yeah. Thank you.

[Nicholas J. DeIuliis:]

Thanks, Welles.

[Operator:]

Next question comes from Sameer Panjwani with Tudor. Please go ahead.

[Sameer Panjwani:]

Hey, guys. Good morning.

[Donald W. Rush:]

Good morning.

[Sameer Panjwani:]

On the Utica in Southwest PA and Central PA, are you planning to test spacing in 2019? Just looks like you're a little bit tighter versus the Ohio, Utica where spacing was widened out a little bit.

[Nicholas J. DeIuliis:]

I think that'll be a part of the natural progression as we move from delineation into development mode with the two Aikens wells that we drilled. We did some testing that would give us some thoughts into spacing. But, yes, as we do more and more, that will be a part of our development process, understanding proper spacing, proper completion designs and size, and we'll move forward with that.

[Sameer Panjwani:]

Okay, great. And then, on the asset exchange with HG, looks like you're giving up a bit on the Midstream side. I just wanted to see if there is any impact to the dropdown EBITDA potential. And then, kind of following on with that, does the transaction on the Midstream side help the Midstream entity potentially pull forward, I guess, the timing of any potential dropdowns?

[Donald W. Rush:]

Yeah, great question. So ultimately, the $200 million of potential drop into EBITDA, the vast majority of that was EBITDA associated with CNX assets and CNX properties, so very de minimis to the $200 million that we quoted at the Analyst Day. And we do feel that it enhances the MLP's ability on the drop side of the fence. And we'll get into that more on the second call, but the certainty in distribution growth, coupled with the potential upside of incremental volumes, incremental wells being drilled, enhances its ability to finance things sooner than it otherwise could have. So we feel this is a big enhancer to both the Midstream companies' sort of standalone value and its ability to do drops with CNX Resources.

[Sameer Panjwani:]

Okay. Perfect. And then last one for me. Just thinking about the leverage metric governor of 2.5 times, as you guys think about it internally in terms of potential capacity for additional buybacks, do you guys internally think about it on an annualized kind of full year basis or do you kind of look at it as a quarterly annualized number on the EBITDA?

[Donald W. Rush:]

Yes. So another great question. I think sort of how we talked a little bit about making sure you look at things multiple ways earlier on in the call, it's important – and we think it's important to do similar for our leverage ratio target. So, we kind of take a holistic approach. We do look at trailing 12 months. We look at next 12 months. We look at last quarter annualized. And we kind of use all three of those to kind of govern a comfortable place going forward. This, we feel, allows us to ensure that we're tracking properly and in a good spot, whether we have growing EBITDA, potentially declining EBITDA, flat EBITDA, those three across the board will always kind of keep you in a comfortable zone. So we look at them all and we'll continue to look at them all as we go forward.

[Sameer Panjwani:]

Okay Thanks, guys.

[Operator:]

This concludes our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Tyler Lewis for any closing remarks.

[Tyler Lewis:]

Great. Thanks, Anita. And thank you, everyone for joining. We look forward to speaking with everyone again next quarter. Thank you.

[Operator:]

This conference is now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.